May 29, 2012

[Please forgive the spastic spacing. Blogspot is having a tantrum.]In David Wagoner’s “To a Farmer Who Hung Five Hawks on His Barbed Wire,” the
speaker imagines a specific and detailed revenge upon a farmer who’s violated
most codes of decency or humility about humanity’s place in the universe. The
farmer has made an arrogant, thoughtless display of his conquests over some of earth’s
most beautiful creatures. What can a moral being do about that? For me,
Wagoner’s apparent answer undermines the argument of the poem, in spite of some
marvelous images of vengeance.

The
speaker wishes the farmer terrible dreams, the details of which force the gun-toting
farmer into an unsought empathy with his victims—and more awareness of the
process of dying “alone in the wind” than he would experience on his own—without
the Wagoner curse upon him.

The
farmer assumes he’s lord of all he surveys and can spend his free-floating
anger on any of his god’s creatures. So there’s something delicious about Wagoner’s
hanging him out to dry, piece by piece, tuft by tuft. He’d have the farmer
think he’s finally dead, then realize there are still more pieces of him left
to hang in the weather, “Your claws clutching at nothing,” until the processes
of nature have completely blown him away. The farmer will be

frozen
and thawed

And
rained away, falling against the grass

Little
by little, lightly and softly,

More
quietly than the breath of a deer mouse.

The
man with the loud gun will hang and rot as quietly as a mouse.

That
sounds so very fitting, but the problem for me after a couple of readings is
this: in dreaming of doing to the
farmer what the farmer has done to the hawks, Wagoner runs the risk of sounding
silly and pointless in his rage. “You offend nature; therefore, I shall wish
you bad dreams. I don’t know if you’ll actually have bad dreams, and surely
you’ll never become a moral human. You won’t even know I’ve wished nightmares
upon you, but I will know, and I guess that’s enough.”

As
good as this imagined revenge might feel for a moment, the farmer will never feel
it; he will wake from each nights’ sleep as refreshed (perhaps) by his own
venom and thoughtlessness as he always was.

Imagined
vengeance as creative in its details as Wagoner’s is surely pleases at some
level. But in the end it is impotent, a perfect illustration of the country
expression, “piss in the wind.”

Once,
a long time ago, I went to a conference on counseling teens. It was led by five
Harvard shrinks, one of whom gave a talk about anxiety and worry in
adolescents. A self-proclaimed wit, the psychologist said, “Worry is like
masturbation; it feels good while you’re doing it, but it doesn’t really get
you where you want to be.” Elsewhere in his speech was a more serious, perhaps
more useful axiom: “Worry precipitates action.”

Does
that mean David Wagoner—or his speaker—should mosey over there and beat up the
offending farmer instead of indulging—masturbatorily—in an American-Gothic
variety of voodoo? I doubt it.

If
there’s a useful lesson here, it might be the pointlessness—but also the
inevitability—of our human need for vengeance, which is the trashy cousin of
justice and morality. However,
neither Wagoner nor his speaker seems aware of the futility of such empty
gestures.

Consider
the logic: “In my imagination, I made you pay; therefore, you have paid.” Isn’t
that a reasonable paraphrase? And isn’t it full of holes? What good does it do
anyone to lie awake wishing injury to an offending, murderous farmer if that
farmer doesn’t know or feel that injury. All the shame and humiliation you’ve
wished upon him as been for naught—and probably poisoned your own sleep.

One
might argue that there’s an element of magical realism in the poem, and we’re
to think it’s plausible that the bad farmer will indeed be terrorized by
nightmares because the speaker wished it so. However, I see no evidence that
Wagoner has put us in a world full of magic, so we’re back to Square One, being
asked to think that wishing makes it so.

“Vengeance
is mine, saith the Lord.” Theology
and modern psychology are full of wisdom (and clichés) about the pitfalls of vengeance,
but that rage is such a natural and human instinct that we seek it time and
time again, plunging into personal wildernesses that are neither beautiful nor
good, that are more like the impotent fury of a child’s tantrum.

After
the fourth or fifth step toward imagined revenge, the whole project probably
stops feeling satisfying. But how we withhold those steps is anyone’s guess.

I
wonder if I’m the only one who finds this problem in a poem that’s otherwise so
appealing in its details of poetic justice. I think of the
old verse: “If
wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.”

To me the poem started out in anger with a crescendo when the roles were reversed and the "flying farmer" met his destiny, followed by an intentionally quiet, soft "landing" - meaning there is nothing more for you. All is quiet.

You may well be right in your interpretation of this as a futile attempt at vengeance. I prefer to step back a pace or ten and look upon it a bit more metaphorically: Not one, bur many species of birds, animals and plants suffers from the destructive power of our species. What would we do if the roles were reversed? The author reversed them for us.

Not surprisingly, I see a simple theme. I've heard it suggested that man is the only beast who kills in anger. (And here I lump domestic animals in with "man," as they've learned our ways and caught some of our emotional diseases.)

And as evidence, I offer this:You’ve had strange appetites now and then,Haven‘t you. Funny quickenings of the heart. Impulses not quite mentionableTo the wife or yourself.